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Oftentimes there's a stigma about seeking therapy. People feeling as though if I go to see a therapist, I'm crazy, or I can't handle my own issues. It's exactly the opposite. Think about it. If you broke a bone, you wouldn't think, oh, I have to deal with this on my own. You would go to a doctor. Similarly, if you're feeling depressed or anxious, it's important to go seek the help of a mental health professional. Specifically, there's a stigma against men seeking therapy. Frequently men don't feel comfortable sharing their emotions, and as a result, don't feel comfortable seeking out therapy. It may make them feel weak or vulnerable. It's very important to make sure you take care of yourself just as much as you would if you had broken a bone. If you're feeling depressed for most of the day, nearly every day, go seek the help of a mental health profession.
Oftentimes there's a stigma about seeking therapy. People feeling as though if I go to see a therapist, I'm crazy, or I can't handle my own issues. It's exactly the opposite. Think about it. If you broke a bone, you wouldn't think, oh, I have to deal with this on my own. You would go to a doctor. Similarly, if you're feeling depressed or anxious, it's important to go seek the help of a mental health professional. Specifically, there's a stigma against men seeking therapy. Frequently men don't feel comfortable sharing their emotions, and as a result, don't feel comfortable seeking out therapy. It may make them feel weak or vulnerable. It's very important to make sure you take care of yourself just as much as you would if you had broken a bone. If you're feeling depressed for most of the day, nearly every day, go seek the help of a mental health profession.
Depression can be difficult and oftentimes may seem like it's too much to bear. It's important to remember that you're not alone. You can have the help of family and friends as well as mental health professionals help guide you through this difficult time. It's not hopeless. You can get through it. Just make sure that you get the help that you need.
When you're meeting your therapist for the first time, it can often be difficult to know, is this the right therapist for me? What you're looking for is what we call fit or patient therapist fit. What that means is that the personality of the therapist fits your needs as a patient. That doesn't mean the therapist needs to be your best friend, but it does mean that the therapist needs to be able to push you when you need to be pushed and at the same time help you along through your journey. If your first therapist or your first experience with therapy didn't go exactly the way you wanted, there's a good chance that it was related to fit and if so, give it another try and see if you can find a therapist that might fit your needs a little bit better. Don't be afraid to tell your therapist what you need or if you feel the fit isn't exactly right. It's your therapy. Make sure you're taking care of yourself. Therapists are trained to recognize a good fit with a patient and a therapist, and if they feel that it's not a good fit, they'll refer you to someone else. It's kind of like if you go to see a dentist for a broken bone, that dentist isn't going to be able to help you, and so they'll refer you to a doctor that will be able to help.
There's often a stigma associated with going to see a therapist. You might say to yourself, if I go see a therapist, that means I'm crazy. Or if I go see a therapist, that means I can't handle my own issues. The truth is that many people seek therapy, even people who aren't dealing with mental health disorders. Oftentimes therapy can help us become better versions of ourselves by helping us learn skills as well as insights about ourselves. A good therapist will help you find the strength within yourself to deal with the situations that you're dealing with.
Therapy can be very expensive at times. Consider that if you're seeing a therapist once a week and paying somewhere between $150 and $250 an hour, that can really add up. Fortunately, there are ways to offset the costs of therapy. First of all, if you have health insurance, it could be a good idea to reach out to your health health insurance provider and ask which therapists would be covered under your plan. Sometimes therapists can be covered in network as well as sometimes your insurance plan may have out of network benefits, which means it will cover part of the therapy for therapists that may not be in your insurance network. Additionally, some therapists offer what's called a sliding scale, where they will make an assessment of your need based on your income and offer you a rate that you can afford. Additionally, group therapy can be a very economical way of getting therapy and getting help. If you're on a college campus, go seek out your college counseling services. They're oftentimes included as part of your tuition.
There are three things that you should ask your therapist before starting therapy with them. Number one, their previous experience treating patients like you. It's really important to know that your therapist knows how to treat a patient, that is dealing with the things that you are dealing with to education and licensure. This is really important to make sure that the therapist that you are seeing is held by a certain ethical and legal code and is educated about that code. And number three, fees. It's often uncomfortable to talk about money, especially when you meet someone for the first time, but it's really important to understand how much therapy is going to cost you, especially because therapy can be pretty expensive.
Automatic negative thoughts are thoughts that pop into your head and create a negative evaluation of the world around you or of yourself. Everybody deals with automatic thoughts. The problem is when you're suffering from anxiety or depression, these automatic thoughts are believed to be true, and then you start evaluating everything with a negative or anxious light. Through CBT, you'll be able to learn to recognize and identify these automatic negative thoughts as well as challenge those automatic negative thoughts and come up with new, more positive thoughts.
If you've been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, then there are a number of treatment options available to you that you'll want to discuss with your mental health care providers - which includes both your therapist and slash or your psychiatrist. For some people and situations. Prescription drugs may be the best treatment option or at least part of the best treatment option. But for other people, that isn't necessary and there are non drug treatments that can benefit people generally regardless of whether they're taking prescription medications or not. Let's talk about a couple of those: one is cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a type of therapy that you can do one-on-one with a therapist that helps you identify and change unhelpful thought and behavior patterns. Another option you might wish to explore is mindfulness meditation. That's the type of meditation that involves cultivating acceptance of your present moment experience and de-emphasizing those future oriented thoughts that tend to be related to the things that you're worried about and overtime can provide some relief. You might be able to find resources both in your area and certainly online that can provide guided mindfulness meditations for you to try in your daily routine. Finally, you might wish to explore something called mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, which is really a blending of the two things I just mentioned and since each of those can be helpful with anxiety, the indication is that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy can also be very helpful for anxiety as well. I encourage you to speak with your mental health care providers to discuss these and other treatment options and they'll help you figure out which ones are best for you.
When you're experiencing anxiety, you have a million worries racing through your mind. Things like: "is my boss happy with my work? Will I be able to pay that bill next month? Did my teacher look at me funny today? Why did I say that?" Excessive worries like this don't accumulate and develop into an anxiety disorder overnight and anxiety disorders don't disappear overnight, either. Non-drug treatments for anxiety often involve developing new habits of thought and behavior and letting go of old ones. So for instance: if you're having thoughts about people's negative judgments about your work product, for instance, then over time you can develop a habit of noticing those thoughts as they arise and then testing them to see how true they are and developing new, healthier, more balanced ways of relating to situations in your life and then responding to them. Like any skill, this one requires practice, but it's the kind of practice that can yield a sense of accomplishment as you do it. Similarly, with mindfulness meditation practice (something else I recommend) this is a practice that can yield more benefits over time. It can deepen and enrich your life over years of practice and at the same time produce immediate short term benefit in the form of stress reduction and relaxation and many other benefits. You should speak with your mental health care provider to determine what treatment approach might be best for you and how your treatment may progress over time. But the important thing is to get started and take that first step.
Medical treatments for depression include medications as well as other procedures that may sometimes be helpful for people who are struggling with depression. Let's talk about medications: there are many different types of what we call antidepressants - medicines that seemed to help certain individuals who are struggling with depression that can provide a significant amount of relief. The most common type of antidepressant medicine that we encounter and that we prescribe is what's called an SSRI and that is short for Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor. These are medicines you may have heard of like Prozac (also known as fluoxetine) or Zoloft (also known as Sertraline.) They're prescribed for depression as well as for anxiety, and they seem to help a lot of people. Basically, they are thought to work by increasing the amount of Serotonin - one of the neurotransmitters or chemicals in the brain in the spaces between brain cells. That being said, the actual mechanism is probably a lot more complicated than that.
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